A great one from Tony Palladino, a cleaned-up and stripped-down version of the tear-off fliers that used to proliferate to such an extent that they almost became invisible. This Christmas card both grabs your attention and evokes nostalgia.

This detail from an anti-Vietnam war poster is represented only on a slide in the Tony Palladino collection. In serif text above the image, the original includes the complaint “I can’t see my flag anymore”—which has some of the same arch plainness or indirection of Chwast’s anti-war End Bad Breath poster of two years prior. Here’s another of various flags by Palladino, one graphic symbol whose permutations he remained fascinated by throughout his career. Despite its relative lack of exposure today, it is one of two Palladino posters in the Library of Congress.

This hinged flag sculpture was originally designed for a cover of Second Coming magazine, but Palladino revisited the idea at intervals. One main conceit is that, on the reverse side, the Italian flag is painted, emphasizing his Italian-American roots. Click through for full magazine cover.

Tony Palladino, along with Chermayeff & Geismar, was enlisted by Mobil to design the poster for Cotton Bowl advertisements in the late-80s and 90s. We don’t actually have this poster in our collection, though we have two others (which will follow shortly); only this slide of it. The others also make use of the visual appearance of a crowd as a way to play with perception of figure and ground. This slide didn’t go through properly the first time so I don’t have a good image of it, but if you click through I’ve included a smaller picture for reference.

In the 1970s, the Mead Library of Ideas held exhibitions showcasing the best contemporary graphic design; they commissioned announcement posters from designers including Tony Palladino, Chermayeff & Geismar, and Seymour Chwast.

About a decade before Tony devised his ‘guerilla marketing’ self-promotion campaign, the designer took a similarly witty but somewhat more traditional approach. Four versions of this card were printed, each in three colors on heavy stock, and sent to publishers without any additional pitch. Set simply with his address and isolating a single area of specialization, they relied on a single strong image to convey their point.

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